Miscellanea, Errata, Et Cetera

This section of Fair Play contains a variety of stuff that didn't quite fit in anywhere else.

Dave Powers Dies

David Francis Powers, who spent his life tending to the family of John F. Kennedy and the library built in his honor, has died at the age of 85.

Powers died in March at Symmes Medical Center in suburban Arlington.

Described by historian and former Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as a man of "exceptional sweetness and fidelity," Powers soon was known as Kennedy's "Sancho Panza," who did everything from campaign work to helping care for Kennedy's children following his assassination.

"Dave Powers was a loyal and devoted friend whom my mother and father adored," said Caroline Kennedy, president of the Kennedy Library Foundation. "I will always be grateful for his personal kindness and for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Kennedy Library."

The man who called himself "just a newsboy who met a president" had been sought out by the wealthy Kennedys in the early days of JFK's political career because he was closely connected to Boston's blue-collar Irish-American families.

Powers was in the motorcade in Dallas when Kennedy was shot. When the president's limousine reached Parkland Hospital, Powers helped remove Kennedy from the car and place him on a stretcher.

That afternoon he flew back to Washington sitting with Jacqueline Kennedy, next to the casket on Air Force One.

"On that long, sad ride home, Jackie sat next to the casket. She was so brave on the trip back to Washington. At one point she turned to me and said, `Oh, Dave, you've been with him all these years. What will you do now?"' Powers in an article for Life magazine. "I choked up --- I couldn't answer her."

Following the assassination, Kennedy's widow sought solace for her son by having Powers come to her house in Georgetown every day at noon so that John F. Kennedy Jr. could eat lunch with him.

Hanging above Powers' desk for many years at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, in a sea of Kennedy memorabilia on his walls, was a picture of the Kennedy children and a thank-you from Jacqueline Kennedy for Powers' help during the weeks after the assassination.

Powers went on to help in former Sen. Robert F. Kennedy's campaigns. He also began work assembling records and memorabilia for the JFK Library in 1964. He served as curator from its opening in 1979 until he retired in 1994.

--Condensed from an Associated Press dispatch

Garrison Biography

Probe magazine reports in its March-April, 1998 edition that a biography of former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison is in the works.

The magazine says the book is being written by Temple University professor Joan Mellen, whose previous biographical work was a "dual biography" on Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman.

The Garrison book, which apparently is not yet titled, is described as a "cradle-to-grave" biography that got underway in the latter part of 1997. "Some good people have been helping her in the early stages," Probe says, including "Vincent Salandria, Ray Marcus, and Chris Sharrett."

Probe is the publication of the Citizens for Truth about the Kennedy Assassination.

Tunheim Profile

The following item, by Greg Gordon, first appeared in the Washington Star-Tribune on March 23, 1998. The ARRB has existed now for four years and ceases to exist later this year, but this article is written with a sort of "Hey! Look what we found!" point-of-view. This is our watchdog media at work.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Most days, he sits in a black robe in a Minnesota courtroom, peering down at environmentalists and loggers, Twin Cities gang members or a murder suspect seeking to collect on his slain wife's insurance policy.

Life on the bench would be stimulating enough for U.S. District Judge John Tunheim even without a second job that immerses him in a shadowy world of intrigue.

Judge John Tunheim leads a special federal panel whose mission is to lift the veils of secrecy surrounding the slaying of President John F. Kennedy.

It is a world that stretches from the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters to the KGB's archives in the former Soviet Union. It is a world of spooks, kooks and a presidential assassin's trail that is a quarter-century old, millions of pages long and still mystifying.

Since 1994, Tunheim has spent two or three days a month leading a special federal panel whose mission is to lift the veils of secrecy surrounding the Nov. 22, 1963, slaying of President John F. Kennedy as he rode through Dallas' Dealey Plaza.

Tunheim and the other four members of the Assassination Records Review Board have butted heads with CIA officials to pry loose thousands of long-classified files from the agency's investigation of JFK's slaying; gotten a copy of the famed Zapruder film of the assassination; uncovered new film footage of the crime scene, and, this month, enlisted Vice President Al Gore to press Russian leaders for access to KGB files.

Tunheim said the board is fulfilling a 1992 law aimed at restoring the public's trust in government -- a trust that he said began to erode with the Warren Commission's conclusion in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald had fired all three shots at Kennedy and probably acted alone.

"The Warren Commission conducted a serious, extensive investigation, issued their report -- and sealed their records," Tunheim said. "It was at the height of the Cold War ... a time when basically the answer from the government was, 'Trust us, but we can't share any information with you.'"

Intelligence agencies operated in such a shroud of secrecy, Tunheim said, that the CIA did not share the findings of its investigation with the Warren Commission.

The commission's report was greeted by harsh attacks from conspiracy theorists. "And then came the follow-up with Vietnam and Watergate," Tunheim said. "It was sort of the start of the unraveling of whatever degree of trust that people had in government."

Tracking Oswald
Tunheim said the board is seeking to enable Americans "to decide for themselves" about JFK's assassination by giving them access to every morsel of information.

In November 1996, Tunheim led a board delegation on a trip to Russia and Belarus to request access to files detailing the KGB's surveillance of Oswald while he lived in the Soviet Union from October 1959 until May 1962. Seventeen months after the young defector returned to the United States with his Russian bride, ostensibly because he was refused Soviet citizenship, he was arrested in Dallas and accused of firing the bullet that tore open Kennedy's skull. While no one saw Oswald shoot Kennedy, his palm prints were on the murder weapon.

Tunheim said that he has pledged to keep an open mind to all possibilities but that he has seen no evidence to support theories that the Soviets recruited Oswald to kill the president. Indeed, CIA files indicate the Soviets were "horrified" to learn that the prime suspect in the assassination was a defector who had spent time in the Soviet Union, he said.

Now that the Cold War is over, Tunheim predicted, "eventually we will get copies of these files, and they will be an important addition to the body of knowledge about this man."

During their visit to Minsk, now part of Belarus, Tunheim and colleagues were allowed to glimpse a 3-foot high stack of KGB files on Oswald. While they weren't given time to translate many of them, he said, it appeared that KGB agents had monitored Oswald's every move in trying to assess whether he was a U.S. spy or could be a Soviet asset.

"Our driver took us to the hotel where Oswald stayed when he first arrived and to the apartment that the KGB provided for him to live in -- a very nice place in an historic part of town overlooking the river," Tunheim said.

Eventually, he said, it appears that the KGB "concluded that [Oswald] was not of value to them."

Tunheim said that during their Washington talks in the first week of March, Gore asked Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin for copies of all files on Oswald from the KGB's Moscow archives, believed to also include the files from Minsk.

He said he has heard of no response. A spokesman for Gore said he could not comment on the vice president's private discussions with Chernomyrdin.

Missing pieces
Oswald's sojourn in Russia is just one of myriad avenues the board has followed in amassing 4 million pages now accessible to the public at the new National Archives building in College Park, Md., where 175,000 of the documents are indexed in a computer database.

The board demanded documents with any potential connection to the assassination from every federal agency, from the Postal Service to the intelligence community, as well as from Congress. At a news conference in Dallas, Tunheim invited shutterbugs who watched the fateful 1963 parade to turn over their film, leading to the recovery of new footage taken at the scene within an hour of the shooting.

And in New Orleans, the board sued the local district attorney for failing to comply with a subpoena for the records of a predecessor, Jim Garrison, who sought in a grand jury investigation to link Oswald to a local businessman with CIA ties. (The files showed that businessman Clay Shaw had a relationship with the CIA, but Tunheim said they documented no link to Oswald).

"We've had to deal with all kinds of people, with all kinds of weird theories -- I think I've heard them all by now," Tunheim said. "There's a lot of passion out there."

Tunheim, who was first recommended for the job in 1992 while he was an assistant to Minnesota Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III, has devoted most of his energy to grappling with CIA and FBI officials over the release of heaps of classified JFK files.

The 1992 law creating the review board required the release of any document the panel considers related to the assassination unless an agency can provide "clear and convincing evidence" that its disclosure would fit a few narrow exceptions. These include creating "a substantial risk of harm" to a government source, interfering with ongoing intelligence activities or compromising security to a degree that would outweigh the public interest. The agencies have the right to appeal any declassification decision to the president.

"At the beginning, it was difficult," Tunheim said. "There were heated arguments. This is the first time any outside group has had declassification authority." CIA and FBI officials, he said, were "perplexed" at first.

At one point, the agencies had more than 100 appeals pending with President Clinton. Clinton never decided any and, in the end, they were all withdrawn, Tunheim said.

Documents declassified so far neither prove nor disprove the Warren Commission's conclusion, Tunheim said, but they have transfixed historians, authors and assassination buffs. They include:

Tunheim said he expects previously classified files from the CIA and FBI to total more than a million pages from each agency before the board wraps up its $8 million review next October. But he has no illusions about putting the JFK mysteries to rest.

"This is like a giant jigsaw puzzle that has a lot of the pieces missing, including critical pieces that you would expect to be there in a normal investigation of a crime of this magnitude," he said.

"What we're doing ... is finding some of these pieces. Others likely will be lost to history forever."

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